Kirkos Ensemble and the Experimental Film Society present Wilderness Notes, a collaboration bringing together two of Ireland’s most innovative contemporary arts group from the fields of music and film.

Wilderness Notes will feature premieres of 3 new films by EFS filmmakers Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan, and Atoosa Pour Hosseini, created in tandem with new compositions by young Irish composers Barry O’Halpin, Sean Ó Dálaigh, and Robert Coleman, which will be performed live by the Kirkos Ensemble.

The three films that comprise Wilderness Notes all explore psychic, territorial and technological margins. Isolated characters, all somehow locked into masks or fixed personae, navigate desolate zones between dimensions where a sense of being physically adrift and at risk is mapped onto a corresponding inner state. But they are not only adrift in space, they are equally adrift in time. Making experimental use of several outdated moving image formats, notably Super-8 and VHS, Wilderness Notes summons up ghosts from an abandoned future, taking its cues from the western, the nightmare of nuclear holocaust and the masks of ancient theatre.

All three of Wilderness Notes’ musical compositions were written to complement EFS’s filmmaking approach. Barry O’Halpin’s is derived from the electromagnetic spectra of 5 chemical elements, resulting in an ethereal and almost alien set of harmonies and moving parts, while Sean Ó Dálaigh pits the ensemble against undulating sine waves and introduces an element of choice into structural repetitions to create a vibrant microtonal universe. In contrast, Kirkos co-director Rob Coleman’s contribution is a song cycle, setting poetry by American poet Morri Creech for voice, ensemble and electronics, examining the states of consciousness that flash beneath the waking mind.